Twitter Third-party App Developers Suggest Twitter Deliberately Limited Access to The Platform

Developers of Twitter’s third party app such as Tweetbot, Echofon, Mastodon, Twitterrific, etc are suggesting that Twitter deliberately limited access to the platform.

Recall that last Friday, a publication on Tekedia revealed that third-party app users were not able to gain access to their accounts which made it unable for them to access their Twitter feeds.

Users/ Developers of these apps therefore suggested that Twitter likely made some changes to its Apis for third-party clients.

Some other users hoped that the difficulty faced in accessing their Twitter account was a temporary glitch which should be resolved as soon as possible.

According to reports, Tweetbot co-creator Paul Haddad even tried to make the app work by loading in old API keys. That trick worked for a while and some folks were able to access their accounts. However, users started to hit an API limit and the client was later suspended again

Also, Third-party app Tweetbot revealed that they reached out to Twitter for more details, but revealed that they haven’t gotten feedback till date.

Due to Twitter’s silence and failure to address the whole challenge that third-party apps are facing accessing the platform, they are suggesting that Twitter deliberately limited access to third-party apps.

Meanwhile, internal messages on the micro-blogging platform disclosed that shutting down certain third-party clients was a company decision rather than a bug.

The report revealed that one project manager told the product team that the company had “started to work on comms,” but didn’t provide any timeline for official and approved communication.

The reason for the suspension couldn’t be learned. Last week, there were speculations that Twitter might have turned off access to the apps deliberately because they don’t help drive ad revenue.

This implies that the apps may be hurting Elon Musk’s ability to stop a major decline in ad revenue in the past two months.

Reacting to Twitter’s action to deliberately suspend third-party apps, and how it failed to communicate to affected users on its recent plan, an app developer Matteo Villa who has made apps for Apple, took to his Twitter account to express his frustration.

He wrote,

“There you go. The total lack of communication is quite insulting for all the people who worked on these apps and use them every day. I mean, the platform is yours and you can do whatever you want with it, but own your own decisions.

“And I’m honestly thinking of also pulling Fenix for iOS from the app store.People are still downloading it, and who knows if or when it’ll stop working.”

There you go. The total lack of communication is quite insulting for all the people who worked on these apps and use them every day.
I mean, the platform is yours and you can do whatever you want with it, but own your own decisions. https://t.co/LPfOdrdrMi

— Matteo Villa (@mttvll) January 15, 2023

Last year, Twitter’s former head of developer platforms, Amir Shevat, disclosed that the new management broke the trust of developers.

“This dubious suspension of third-party Twitter clients without any communication will not instill any confidence in the community”, he said.

Since Musk took over Twitter last year, he has been carrying out a series of revamps at the company and has reportedly shuttered several developer-related projects including Twitter Toolbox for app discovery.

Lately, developers have been cautious about their Twitter development plan given that the company hasn’t explicitly communicated its plans about platform support.